EATING DANTE

PUGLIA
[i]Pugliese food, more than any other region in Italy, would probably be described as the most Italian. If it were possible to say such a thing. Pugliese food represents the essence of modern thought behind Italian food – take a single ingredient and try to capture it unique character, and bring it to the fore. You may eat the best meal of your life in Puglia.
Puglia’s most famous pasta is the sublime "orecchiette," the “little ear” shaped pasta often still made by hand and served with cime di rapa, bitter turnip tops tossed with anchovies. In fact, most of the pasta, including cavatelli, a flatter version of orecchiette, are served with vegetable-based sauces. Often, however, they are laced with a touch of something else, such as spiced lard, some stock, or even a meatball or two.
The pane, bread, of Puglia is legendary, and some of the best bakers in Roma and Milano are of Puglian descent. By far, the best pane is cooked in a wood fire. You may also come across taralli, which can be like tiny circular pretzels or as big as a doughnut. They can be crispy or just crusty, but they always have a hole in the middle.
World Food Italy, Lonely Plant Books, 2000

After dinner, I took the train back to Naples. Early the next morning, I checked out of my hotel, collected the car from its spot deep in the bowels of the hotel’s garage and got the hell out of Naples. I headed toward a town in Puglia called Foggia. There is not much to Foggia, but I did stop in a restaurant that was a self-service hot plate kind of place and had the most amazingly delicious lunch. I selected roasted red peppers that had been stuffed with breadcrumbs fried in olive oil and garlic, a ball of that amazing mozzarella bufala and a salad of tomatoes with basil, olive oil and pepper. What a light but really delicious lunch.

My knee is really starting to hurt from all this walking, so I didn’t explore Foggia much. Instead, I stashed the car in a secure parking lot and got on the train to head down to Bari on the Adriatic coast.

Bari is deep into what is known as Greek Italy. I read up on some history of this part of Italy on the train. It seems that Greek settlers colonized the at least part of Puglia during the centuries before Rome swallowed everyone else in the region. I had come to Italy expecting to find Roman ruins on every street corner but that simply isn't true. Although Roman power eventually extended all over peninsular Italy, its presence was often very lightly felt in some places. You can tell this in part from the absence of Roman names for the cities.

Puglia is one of Italy’s breadbaskets. It is a land with very rich soil and every inch of it is cultivated. Olive trees even grew in places on the sides of the railroad tracks, and every home seemed to have an olive tree and some grape vines in the back yard.

Being on the seacoast, Bari is famed for its seafood and the dinner I had there proved it. I ordered zuppa di pesce, expecting a replay of the dish I had eaten in Pescara but it was nothing of the sort. The entire dish, which was served in this huge platter, consisted of muscles and tiny clams that we would call cherrystones. The other ingredients were garlic chopped into very small pieces, fish stock, white wine, olive oil and parsley.

It was amazingly good and it had so few ingredients. It looked huge when they brought it that I said to the waiter, this is for one person (questa e per solo uno?). He laughed and said yes. Oh, I forgot the last ingredient, squares of bread that were brushed with extra virgin olive oil, then grilled and placed in the stock. It really wasn't that much to eat. Both the clams and the mussels were very tiny. For the main course I had grilled lamb chops that came with a wedge of lemon. It was amazing how the lemon changed the flavor.

I wandered back to the hotel and caught the train the next morning back to Foggia, then drove to Caserta, which is between Naples and Rome. My plan to drive to the tiny village of Colle Felice, which is where my mother's parents were from. It was raining pretty heavily and as I headed into the mountains the rain got heavier and the cloud cover got lower. About halfway there I was driving so slow the car was in third gear because visibility was so low and I was crawling. It was a non -starter so I turned off, had lunch in a little place and headed back.

The restaurant was very nicely done up, with fancy lighting and waiters in black vests and bow ties and a maitre d' dressed in a white tux. I thought oh boy, this is going to put a crimp in the budget. But the menu was very reasonably priced and the place was packed with local families out for Sunday lunch. I had only the pasta course, which was spaghetti tossed with crushed tomatoes, and olive oil, shrimp and cremini mushrooms and tiny slices of pancetta, Italian bacon. The dish was called spaghetti alla mare e monti, spaghetti from the sea and the mountain. This was only the second time a dish came with pieces of garlic in it. In most of the north of the county, the garlic is removed before dishes are served. As Mario Batalli always says, Italians like the flavor and smell of garlic in their food but they don't necessarily want to eat pieces of it. Well, seems they do in Campania. Tomorrow, I light out for Rome and turn in the car.
The next day, I awoke early, skipped breakfast and headed for Rome. My first stop was the Fiumincino Airport. Europcar had given me the choice of turning in the car at a city location or at the airport, some 30 miles from Rome proper. Thinking that that an airport would be far easier to find than a street address in the city, I chose the airport. Stupid. Really stupid.
The airport is not only far from Rome, it’s bloody difficult to find, given that it hosts international airline flights. There were no end of airplanes to be seen, wheels down, approaching the area where the field was purported to be located. In addition, cars streamed toward the place that signs, in Italian, of course, indicated an airport could be found. Coulda fooled me.
I got onto a ring road around the airport, and searched for the sign that would tell me where to turn in the car. And kept searching. Ring roads, as the name implies, go in circles. As did I. Endlessly. I could not find the car rental return area. I wound up driving clear off the airport grounds and onto a narrow road that ran through the bowels of an industrial area that looked like something out of a post nuclear holocaust movie. It was the first time in Italy that I saw a large collection of semi-trucks all in one place. That place was behind all those trucks on a very narrow, two-lane road. It was unusually straight and ran on for miles. When I finally got back to the highway, the only on ramp was heading in the wrong direction. I got on the road and turned around at the next off ramp. Then, I promptly got lost again and spent another half hour finding the highway again.
At that point I decided just to start all over again. I drove north until I found the exit for Fiumincino, then retraced my path. This time, I pulled over at a taxi stand and offered to pay the first driver I found who spoke English to lead me to the car rental return. He complied gladly. It was the best 10 Euros I spent on my trip.
Once at Eurocar, I had some paper work formalities to attend to. In a bout of hand-to-hand combat with a very narrow parking garage I had left a number of dings and scratches in the car. I had also knocked a strip of plastic off the passenger side door. That strip spent the rest of the trip in the car’s trunk. Now, I had to fess up to the rental clerk about the damage. In a rare burst of foresight, I had signed up for lots of extra insurance when I rented, and the damage caused nothing more than some temporary embarrassment.
My next trip was via train into downtown Rome. My hotel was supposedly right around the corner from Rome’s main train station. “Right around the corner” is a flexible concept when one is lugging four pieces of baggage. It actually took me only 10 minutes to find the hotel but it was raining and I was soaked thoroughly when I dragged myself through the hotel’s front door.
I had anticipated that the closer I got to Rome, the more expensive and skimpier the third-class hotel accommodations would be. Nothing I saw from the front lobby of the hotel led me to revise that idea. In fact, the place didn’t even have a real front lobby, just a street level entry foyer, and the elevator didn’t even come down to that level. Just to register, I had to drag my bags up two flights of stairs, cram them into what I had by now learned to anticipate would be a tiny elevator and go up two floors to the check-in desk.
There I was met by an urbane looking gentleman of indeterminate age who formally welcomed me to Rome and to the hotel and asked me for my passport. I fished it out of one of my bags and turned it over. He handed me the key and I struggled with my bags back to the shoebox of an elevator. Not once during my stay in Italy did any hotel staff offer to help me with my bags, and this character was no exception. The elevator stopped one floor below mine, so I had to drag the bags up another floor, unlock a door and go down a corridor to my room.
I anticipated that my room in a three-star hotel in Rome would be small, but this one was a new adventure in small. The bed was a narrow strip along one wall, the bathroom, tinier than most people’s closets, was across from it. Beneath a window between the two extremes was a small desk with a lamp and a copy of the Rome telephone directory and a bible. Nice touch.
Room was admittedly immaculate, but some “thoughtful” staffer had, of course, opened windows in the room and in the bathroom. So, I began my stay with my by now familiar mosquito hunting ritual. In perhaps the sole example of good pre-planning for the trip, I had packed some of my own towels, a useful precaution as it turned out, since Italian hotels stock towels the size of dishtowels in the U.S. I fetched one of mine and began slapping at mosquitoes lurking in corners near the ceilings in the room. That done, I took a quick shower, changed clothes, and headed out to explore some of Rome.
If one is a Roman Catholic, devout or otherwise, one’s first stop in Rome is going to be Vatican City. Why fight it, I thought. The hotel clerk turned out to be far more helpful with directions than he had with luggage. In response to my question about how to get to Vatican City on foot, he produced a map and drew in a route in red ink.
Thus armed, I walked down four flights of stairs – that damned elevator made me claustrophobic – made a right turn out of the hotel door and headed for the seat of Catholicism in the world. It was a longish walk and the day was warm, so I stopped a couple of times to buy drinks and once at a small bar to buy a snack. The bar served a variety of sandwiches, all of them toasted. The Italians seem to toast everything that can be placed between two slices of bread. In fact, one variety of isandwiches is called “toast.” It isn’t the sort of toast that those of us in most of the English-speaking world call toast, two slices of toasted, buttered bread. It is a small, thin sandwich made with wide, thin slices of bread. Fillings typically consist of a few slices of prosciutto, a bit of lettuce and some tomato. I never saw any food in Italy served with mayonnaise.
The bread is brushed lightly with olive oil and placed on a machine that toasts both sides at once, hence the name. Calling the sandwich “toast,” seems to be part of the mania in the Italian commercial world for assigning English names to things.
Another common sandwich type sold in bars was the “pannini,” which in fact is the Italian word for sandwich. Pannini were the closest things to what we in the U.S. call heroes, submarine sandwiches or grinders, depending on what part of the country we eat them in. The Italian version was much smaller, with far less filling than is common in our sandwiches of that type. My pannini that day held only three ingredients, prosciutto, thin slices of – what else? – Roma tomato, and a thin slice of creamy cheese that melted beautifully in the toasting machine.
The sandwich came in a little envelope of waxed paper, the better to keep my fingers clean as I ate it – nice touch that. I had an espresso with my sandwich and thought once again that the only culinary disappointment on my trip had been Italian coffee.
Not that there is anything wrong with espresso but it comes in a tiny serving that is – barely – a mouthful. The quality of espresso varied greatly from one region to another. Sometimes it was delicate and delicious. Other times it came across like a mouthful of caffeinated mud. And cappuchino was a stunt, a slightly larger mouthful that consisted mostly of air and milk foam. In grudging deference to American tourists, many Italian hotels and restaurants served something called “café Americano,” which tasted to me like nothing more than strong espresso brew diluted with hot water. Rarely was I ever served either cappuccino or espresso that was really hot. Long before the trip ended I yearned for a tall cup of Seven – 11 or Starbucks coffee served hot enough to generate a lawsuit.
Lunch having been disposed of, I walked the five blocks to the central bus station and took a bus to Vatican City. My first view of St. Peter’s was both awe inspiring and a bit disappointing. Television makes every place look bigger than it really is. St. Peter’s was no exception. Seeing it up close and recalling the many TV images of people crammed into it for Vatican special events I realized those people must have smelled each other even in the open air. St. Peter’s Basilica lies at the back of the Vatican piazza, an open area laid out in a sort of semi-circle. Behind it, the Basilica’s many statues of saints and Vatican dignitaries from the past makes an impressive back drop. There was only one entrance open into St. Peter’s and there was a long line of tourists waiting for their chance to view the inside. I hate waiting in lines, so I began circling around the area, looking to hookup with a guided tour.
Groups of people clustered around guides, many of whom sported microphones that broadcast their patter to the members of their groups. Stupidly, I had neglected to look into hooking up with a tour guide back at the hotel, so now I was reduced to trying to find a group just starting out. The guides identified themselves to their flocks by tying bits of colored cloth or ribbons to their umbrellas and holding them aloft. At times, the area was filled with people trailing along behind men and women holding aloft these decorated umbrellas.
It was possible, of course, for tourists to get into the Vatican through the public entrances without being part of a guided tour, but the lines of these unfortunates were enormously long. A few discrete questions revealed that the unofficial estimate of wait time on these lines was up to six hours, and as it was already past noon and the Vatican’s doors closed at 4 p.m., this seemed like a losing option.
I was hanging around somewhat despondently near a small café on a side street when I saw a youngish woman, umbrella on high with colored cloth waving from its tip, leading a group of people inside. Intrigued, I followed. Jennifer, as I learned she was named, was signing up people for a group tour of the Vatican. The café was sort of her central recruiting station. I had learned to doubt the ability of Italians to identify Americans on sight but I knew immediately that these people were from the U.S. I tagged along into the café just as Jennifer began her spiel. Her tour was three hours long and cost 25 Euros. As I had no other options, I ponied up my money and got a little brochure that described the tour.
Jennifer spoke fluent Italian but with such a pronounced American accent that even I could hear it. She collected our money while simultaneously addressing the guy behind the counter as “carrissimo,” and ordering an espresso. She might have an American accent, but she could schmooze in Italian with the best of them. Without missing a beat, she switched back to English, telling everyone to gather round while she did a quick head count of her chicks. A few of the tour group were quite elderly and Jennifer told them to speak up if she walked too fast for them. She pointed to the colored cloth on the tip of her umbrella and told us to look for it if we lost sight of her. I figured if she walked as fast as she talked, we were in for the full aerobic tour of the Vatican. As it turned out, she did.
After gulping her coffee, she ran down the rules. Talking in the Vatican should be done sotto voce and was disallowed completely in the Cistine Chapel. Similarly, photograps are also disallowed in the Cistine Chapel. This news produced a few protests, but Jennifer pointed out that it was a Vatican rule and not subject to dispute or negotiation. This bit of genius, she explained later, followed a decision by Vatican officials to accept a donation from the largest Japanese photo agency, the money to be spent on restoration. In return, the Japanese agency had been given exclusive rights to photos from the Cistine Chapel. Nice deal, if you’re an art piece in need of restoration but not so hot if you are a tourist in the Cistine Chapel for perhaps the first and last time in your life. That bit of wisdom imparted, Jennifer took off for an entrance to the Vatican reserved for tour guides, her ducklings hobbling along behind her.
We left the café, turned right then left, and walked the length of an enormous line of people awaiting entry through a public gate. We collecting a few venomous looks as we cruised past the line and entered the Vatican behind an American lady with an umbrella held over her head. Once inside, Jennifer gathered us around her and laid out the plan for touring the Vatican.
Since talking has been outlawed in the Cistine Chapel, Jennifer took us to a courtyard somewhere on the Vatican grounds and gave us a sort of pre-lecture on what we would see in the Chapel. The courtyard was crowded with other tourists and guides, all getting the same rundown in various languages, including one group hearing it in Japanese. I wondered how some of the terms translated into that language. The Japanese-speaking tourists were all listening to what she said with rapt attention, some nodding in agreement with some points their guide made, so they must have been getting something out of it.
Jennifer led us to a group of panels lined up against a wall. These were perfect representations of the Cistine Chapel ceiling. Using a pointer, she began to lead us through some of the information that Michaelangelo had put into his paintings nearly 500 years ago.
Michaelangelo, Jennifer informed us, painted the Cistine Chapel ceiling during two distinct periods in his life. The first he did as a young painter in his 30s; the second he produced in his mid-60s. The differences in technique and representation, she told us, could be seen in how he painted and the way Michaelangelo laid out his narrative.
For the benefit of those who’ve never seen the chapel ceiling, Michaelangelo painted on its surface the story of creation. The “panels” show a curious evolution, beginning as smaller and crammed more tightly together, and becoming larger and spaced more widely, a product our guide told of us of the artist trying to finish the job before the Pope of the time, Clement VI, got totally fed up with the time and expense the job was requiring.
Michaelangelo was a Tuscan, so he was a bit of an outsider at the court of the Vatican, and he had enemies who resented his talents, not to mention his having gotten the job, and who sniped at him constantly, criticizing his work and whispering poison about him in the Pope’s ear. But he got even in his artistic way by using the faces and bodies of some of his more strident opponents in his depiction of the condemned souls being cast into hell. One critic, a rather prominent thinker of his day, he portrayed in a panel as a donkey, complete with donkey ears and hooves, as God consigns him to the outer darkness. Once our history lesson was complete, Jennifer led her charges inside the Vatican itself.
We walked through a door and went down a long, rather narrow corridor, lined on both sides with gorgeous tapestries. The ceiling of this corridor was also painted with various biblical and religious themes, painted by artists less luminous than Michaelangelo, but still magnificently done. Photos were allowed here, but no flash attachments were permitted, apparently out of fear that thousands of flash exposure would cause the colors of the tapestries to fade.
The corridor led to a door, through which dignitaries awaiting a papal audience would pass. The overall effect was awe inspiring, as it was no doubt intended to be. The Pope, especially in the Middle Ages, when much of this art was produced, was truly a Prince of the Church, and protocol required that visitors pass through levels of increasing opulence until they arrived in the august presence. Or anyway that’s how Jennifer explained it.
She led us to another part of the Vatican, where were displayed the large collection of statuary dating back to Roman times. Our guide took great delight in explaining to use why the male statues were missing certain anatomical parts. Pope Pius the VIII apparently took exception to this “pagan” art that displayed women and especially men in their natural state, that is, nude. Incensed by the presence of all this marble genitalia in the Vatican, he ordered the men to be shorn of their parts, in the name of decency.
When we arrived in the Cistine Chapel, it was mobbed with tourists. Despite the ban on talking, their was a steady buzz of conversation that never died out entirely, despite the efforts of the Vatican guards who circulated among the crowd, intoning, “No talking, no photos.” A few people tried to sneak some shots of the Chapel ceiling or the altar. Caught by the guards, they were hustled out of the Chapel and their cameras confiscated.
I sat on the Chapel floor and gazed at the ceiling for nearly an hour. Every once in a while, when the guards were distracted, I used the zoom feature of my digital camera to get a close-up view.

LE MARCHE

Le Marche is the smallest of Italy’s regions being, according to one guidebook, only about the size of Rhode Island. It is a narrow strip of a city that reminded me of Virginia Beach in winter. Much like that city, Pesaro’s strip was largely empty, and there was certainly no shortage of available hotel rooms. The city had that deserted look that often comes over seaside resort town during the off-season. Many of the restaurants I passed during my stroll down the main drag from my hotel were closed and Pesaro turned out to be one of the few places in Italy I had a tough time tracking down a decent meal. It was also the first place where I saw dogs running loose and dog feces on the sidewalk. It was not an auspicious introduction.

I finally found a sandwich truck, ironically in the parking lot behind my hotel. I bought a pork sandwich, which was really delicious. I had not however, come to Italy to eat something I could have whipped up in my kitchen. I had a glass of wine at a neighborhood bar and went to bed early. The next day after a breakfast of hot rolls and cappuccino, I decided I had sampled what little Pesaro had to offer in winter. I checked out of the hotel and decided to head for the Abruzzo and another, more sizeable seaside town called Pescara.

THE ABRUZZI (Abruzzo and Molise)

I left Pesaro at first light the next morning and made for the Abruzzo. That headed me back into the mountains. I passed through numberless small towns. As I passed through one of these, the road narrowed, and I pulled into a service station to gas up and get some coffee. Heading into the little café attached to the gas station I passed a couple hunters coming out of it. They were tacked out in camouflage clothes with belts of shotgun ammunition around their waists. They headed toward a small pickup truck where a large dog sat quietly.

In the café was a selection of locals drinking coffee and eating brioche. One elderly man, already smoking a cigar, ordered an espresso. The guy behind the counter topped up the old guy’s coffee with a slug of Sambuca, the Roman anise liqueur. The guy saw me watching and winked at me. I got my cappuccino, without the topper, and headed out.

Driving out of town, I passed a lingerie store called “Sexy Shop,” a nationwide chain of women’s underwear stores, sort of like Victoria’s Secret. This place was in the middle of nowhere, but it had its own Sexy Shop. The name struck me very funny and I pictured the two hunters stopping off in there, browsing to pick up something for the wife. The image started me laughing so hard I had to pull the car over.

The name of the store highlighted something that I had noticed all over the country. English has a sort of cache in Italy, especially used in advertising. Once, in a pharmacy in Udine, I was half listening to a radio spiel for perfume. The announcer stopped in the middle of the ad and said “alluring woman,” in English, then switched back to Italian. Another time I was driving in my rental car listening to an ad for the radio station I had tuned into. In middle of a torrent of Italian the announcer said “One Station, One Nation.” There must be perfectly good Italian phrases for all of the above but Italian advertisers must feel that using English to say them adds something.

The amazing thing about the Abruzzo was how the mountains marched right down to the sea. My drive toward Pescara took me up a twisting highway. To my left were towering hills, sculpted by Italian farmers who were obviously hipped to the advantages of contour farming. To my right, towering rock walls sprang up right from the edge of the highway, often enough covered with fine wire mesh to prevent rock falls.

The other remarkable thing about this region was how empty it appeared. The emptiness of this mountainous region was broken only by a few towns perched at the tops of hills or nestled in the gaps between mountain ridges. Typically, the road I was on was the only one through the towns I passed and I couldn’t help but notice that every inch of soil near a town was under cultivation. There was no shoulder to the road so the farms came right up to the road, and it was in the Abruzzo that I first concluded that the national motto of Italy should be find dirt, plant something, eat it.

In early afternoon, I pulled into the city of L’Aquila, which translates to the eagle. I parked the car and headed off to see the sights. There was some sort of street fair going on and a number of streets had been blocked off and given over to street vendors, who were selling everything they could think of. There were clothes vendors, a guy selling luggage, multiple vendors of jewelry and plenty of people peddling foods. I passed a trailer selling pastries and I was immediately intrigued by one cookie for sale called “van dei morti,” dead man’s bones. They were anise cookies that are twice baked to make them extra crispy. I tasted one, and it was delicious so I ordered some. There seemed to have been some kind of miscommunication because I ended up with a pound of the things.

I wondered where the name dead man’s bones could have come from. What the hell could be the connection between a corpse devoid of flesh and a cookie? According to one book I consulted on the subject, the name came from Roman times, commemorating a devastating Roman defeat at the hands of Hannibal. The battle took place around what is now called Lake Trasimeno. Tens of thousands of Roman Legionaires died there. Exactly why a cookie should commemorate them is something that will probably never be known.

After eating four of them, I hadn’t even made a dent in the bag. I put it on the seat next to me and in early afternoon I headed out of L’Aquila almost due east toward Pescara. The ground rose steadily as I headed into the part of the Abruzzo that contains Italy’s largest national park, and a huge dome of rock called the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the huge rock of Italy. The Abruzzo is perhaps the wildest part of Italy and the Gran Sasso is the wildest part of the Abruzzo. The area teams with wild game such as boar and various members of the deer family. It’s a favorite hunting spot for Italians from all over the country. One result of this inheritance is that the Abruzzo’s cuisine teems with game dishes.

The day was calm, almost totally without wind and the Adriatic was flat, glassy and the most incredible blue. I had to stop and admire the view so I left the highway and drove to the top of one of these nameless hills, parked the car and got out to look at the view.

Far below me, a tiny ship beat its way slowly across the face of the sea, leaving behind a tiny barely discernible wake. Across the water lay Eastern Europe. That was for another trip.

Pizza and palm trees make an odd combination but palm trees lined the streets of Pescara and pizzerias were certainly in no short supply. This city is one of the places Italians themselves go to when they want a cheap seaside getaway. Make that relatively cheap. The scenery leading into the city was spectacular. The highway descended steeply toward the Adriatic. Fingers of mountain marched directly toward the sea and ended in spectacular cliffs. Here and there cities perched atop the hills, sometimes spreading partway down their sides.

Pescara is another of those long, skinny cities that lay along the Adriatic. It reminded me of Virginia Beach, down to the two main drags that ran arrow straight from one end of the town to the other, lined on the seaward side with tall palm trees. Like many a seaside resort, the beach was lined with shops and the Italian equivalents of fast food restaurants, mostly pizzerias and places that advertised fried fish and similar attractions. On this first day of November most of these places were closed. The summer season was over but it was too early for winter visitors to have arrived in force.

Pescara was one of the few places in Italy that I visited where Italians from elsewhere in Italy seemed to out number tourists. My hotel was filled with Italians and their children, obviously taking advantage of Pescara’s attractions to have a cheap vacation. After dropping off my stuff at the hotel, I went out to explore the town in the warm early afternoon sun.

Within four or five blocks of the downtown, which was dominated by high-rise hotels, the surroundings became more residential, with small homes and apartment buildings, groceries and green grocers. Back to the tourist area, I cruised the main shopping area and admired the high-end shops the fashionable Italians strolling in and out of them. I was hungry, so I popped into a small restaurant and had a snack, a type of lettuce called radicchio stuffed with a bread crumb and mushroom combination, then brushed on the outside with olive oil and grilled over a wood fire. It was just enough for a snack and unbelievably delicious, given the small number of ingredients.

Back at the oceanfront, I sat on a bench and watched a group of Italian college kids toss a frisbee around. There was a large central square one block away from the oceanfront. I wandered around it looking at the magazines and newspapers on display at the newsvendors. Italians, like most Europeans, read newspapers in far greater numbers that do most Americans. The newspapers from the country’s major cities, Rome, Milan, Venice, etc. circulate nationally and are widely read. This day, the newspapers were full of America’s presidential election. Even with my limited Italian it was pretty clear that most of the stories seemed to be pretty uncomplimentary to Mr. Bush. Our European “allies” seemed not to appreciate our president’s muscular approach to foreign policy.

I was also startled by the sexual frankness of so many of the magazines I saw for sale at the kiosks. I’m not sure why I was so surprised, since watching Italian satellite TV at hotels where I stayed around the country should have clued me in to the fact that Italians are less, well, inhibited, about matters sexual.

One of the first things I noticed was that Pescara’s many attractions didn’t include distinguished architecture. In a land where duomos and magnificent basilicas dot the landscape with astonishing frequency, Pescara lacked them entirely or anything else that would cause a visitor to stand transfixed with awe. The most remarkable thing about the city was its natural surroundings, the blue Adriatic on one side and Appenine bluffs on the other side.

The other thing remarkable about Pescara was the food. Italians are generally seafood mad and in this city, perched alongside the Adriatic, seafood was raised to an art form. Nevertheless the rather large number of semi-clad babes on the covers of magazines displayed prominently came as something of a shock.

Late in the afternoon, I wanted something more substantial to eat, so I set out to find an outdoor restaurant. I stopped at one, really it was just a small pizzeria, or so it seemed. Picture my surprise when I had one my most memorable meals at this little, unimpressive looking place.

A waiter spotted me reading the menu posted outside the restaurant and came over to try to wheedle me into sitting down. He addressed me in Italian, something of a relief even if I didn’t understand all he said. At least he wasn’t speaking to me in German. I was too embarrassed to walk away while he was wheedling me into buying a meal there, so I allowed myself to be led to a table. He handed me a menu, placed a basket of fresh bread on the table and retreated to a discreet distance.

The menu wasn’t very extensive but one item caught my eye, a fish soup, called zuppa di pesche in Italian. Fish soup on Adriatic coast seemed like it might make for an interesting meal, so that’s what I ordered. The waiter complimented me on my choice, this time in English, so I guess I was giving off subtle clues as to my country of origin.

It took about 20 minutes for the dish to arrive. When it finally did, it was worth every minute of the wait. The soup came in a two-handled tureen that had obviously come straight out of the oven. It radiated heat. It was a peculiar thing, but few dishes I ate in Italy were served piping hot. Lukewarm was the rule except for soups, which by contrast often came boiling hot. The zuppa di pesche was no exception. It was far too hot to eat right away, so I took a slice of bread, dipped a corner in the broth and took a bite. The result was ecstasy.

The soup came with four squares of toast standing upright in the soup. They’d been brushed with olive oil, grilled and then stuck in the soup. I ate them first and practically fainted they were so delicious. By then the soup had cooled enough to start eating it.

Sticking a spoon in the soup was like starting an archeological dig – uncovering layers. The chef had started off with fish broth, then layered in small shrimp, crayfish, something called a frog fish, the exact nature of which I thought was better left unexplored, sea bas, sardines, and prawns. The last items to be added to the soup were mussels and clams, which cooked the fastest.

In typical Italian style, the fish were whole, heads and all, in the soup. Since the chef had prepared the soup in layers, I ate it that way. I finished off the clams and muscles, and then started in on the crayfish and shrimp. After them, I ate the finfish. The sardines had an entirely different taste and feel than do the ones that come packed in oil in cans. These were full-sized fish, and cooked perfectly. Even the bones were soft enough to eat. Italians believe that cooking a fish whole, bones and all, adds an element of flavor to the soup. Who was I to argue?

When I got to the bottom of the soup, I had another of those face-in-the-bowl moments. I contented myself with sopping up the dregs with some bread. Broth, finfish, shellfish, a few herbs and spices; that was the whole show. It was almost like witchcraft, the way Italians could take a few simple ingredients and churn out something so heavenly.

And zuppa di pesche isn’t exactly Italian haute cuisine. A few days later I read in one of my guidebooks a discussion of living in Italy and learning to cook Italian style. The author commented snidely on zuppa di pesche as something that every Italian cook had in his or her bag of tricks. Well if that was true, I decided Italy might just have a houseguest for life.

I left Pescara early in the morning on Tuesday and headed south. Driving through the Apennines, the spectacle was amazing. It's easy to forget just how mountainous a country Italy is. This was so-called “peninsular Italy, perhaps the most mountainous section of the country, except for the far north.

The highway, very sensibly, followed the contours of valleys between the mountains, and as I looked from side to side I saw towns on the crowns of hills and flowing down their flanks. A hell of a lot of this part of Italy is simply empty, consisting of mountains and smaller hills covered with what looks like scrub pine. As I approached a town, I would find tilled fields carved out of the hillsides, some still growing winter vegetables and row after row of vines. Abruzzo isn’t much known for wine, so these may have been table grapes.

The weather had finally turned decent, and I drove through mountains that were for the first time unobscured by mist and clouds. On the road around me, the produce of this region was streaming towards the cities of the south on articulated trucks packed with artichokes and one truck towing two trailers packed with fennel.
 
As I got further south I noticed an ominous change. The highway began to be littered with trash, the first time I had seen this in Italy. Ahead of me the tops of the mountains were again obscured, but this time by a muddy brown haze that could only have been pollution.
 
When I got past Rome, I headed onto a feeder road into Casserta, the regional capital of this part of Campagnia. My father's parents came to America from this region in the late 1890s, from a little town called Afragola. I passed the exit for it on the A1 but didn't turn off. I had planned to explore that a little later, although a friend from Italy had told me before I left on the trip that the area had been largely destroyed during fighting between the Allies and German forces during WWII. Nothing was now left of the old farming town, he had told me.

As I drove into Casserta looking for a hotel, my heart sank. The city was dirty, littered with trash. And the drivers were living up to the reputation of drivers in the south of the country, that is, crazy. People passed on the right and changed lanes without signaling, went through red lights and gave no quarter to pedestrians, all completely the opposite of how drivers behaved in northern Italy. I so disliked the look and feel of Casserta that I drove back out of town and back onto the Autostrada headed into Naples. For the first time in this country, my spirits were low.
 
I took one of the northern most exits for Naples and immediately regretted it. The streets were twisting, hilly and incredibly congested. People double and triple parked and their appeared nowhere to park or even pull over. Delivery trucks seemed simply to stop wherever they were and unloaded their wares, regardless of traffic, whose drivers leaned on their horns, shook their fists and shouted curses. I spent half an hour circling aimlessly, not seeing even one hotel much less a place to park, so I managed finally to find my way back to the Autostrada and went further south, to an area near the city center.
 
As I drove into Naples proper, I remembered my mother's complaints when she toured Italy in the early 1970s. She had commented bitterly about how dirty everything was. I recall being amused at the time, imagining her driving around the country saying "Why don't they clean this place up?" By the time I got to the area around the central train station, I was muttering the same thing.
 
Naples' streets are incredibly dirty, filled not only with litter but also with actual garbage. The streets of the other places I had been in the country were nearly immaculate by comparison. Garbage bins on the streets were filled to overflowing and then garbage was simply piled around them. Dogs roamed the streets freely and for the first time I saw piles of dog excrement on sidewalks.

 I found a relatively nice hotel for a good price and checked in. It was right around the corner from the train station. The people who worked there didn't seem to have any sense of service. There was no place in front of the hotel to park and I didn't want to horse my luggage from the garage, about 300 meters away. Oh, no, they told me, you can't park outside. Just long enough to unload my luggage? I asked. They shrugged. Their attitude seemed to be “on your head be it.” No one offered to help me carry my bags. All four of them just stayed behind the desk arguing about something on the computer.
 
After unloading my bags, I drove around and around trying to find the garage where the hotel had reserved spaces. I went back to the hotel twice to get directions again but to no avail. Finally, one clerk said drive around the back of the building and it is right there. And so it was. What the little jerk didn't tell me was that it was back off the street down an alley and it wasn't marked by a sign. I parked the car, paid the fee and walked back to the hotel in a real pissy mood.
 
The hotel itself was really nice, the nicest expect for the one I had stayed at in Udine. After dropping off my luggage, I set out to the train station and took a local train to another town up the line called Benevento. To my disappointment, it was every bit as dirty and chaotic as Naples. I wandered around the old section of the city. I passed an archaeological dig beside a medieval church. The area was fenced off but it was still covered in garbage. At another dig site, this one fenced and roofed, all kinds of garbage had been thrown onto the roof surface, including I saw an entire chicken. I was totally at a loss to explain this level of slovenliness.

The odd thing is that this mess extended only to public spaces as far as I could see. Strolling past restaurants, bars, cafes and shops, I could see that their interiors were immaculate. So why were public areas so neglected?
 
The Benevento drivers were every bit as crazy as their counterparts were in Naples. Crossing the street was akin to forcing the landings at Normandy and the motorcycle drivers were kamikaze-like in their weaving in and out of traffic. I was really surprised at this because in the rest of Italy, pedestrians rule. I recall almost having to get of the car and bribe pedestrians to get out of my way. Here, it was totally different. Disgusted, I caught the train back to Naples and stopped at a restaurant for dinner. This at least was up to expectations.
 
My first course was mozzarella bufala, a variety of the cheese made with milk from water buffalo, the Campagna's gift to the rest of Italy. It came, two perfect round balls of cheese, on a bed of lettuce of some kind I didn't recognize. The cheese has a sort of gummy outer shell, with soft cheese underneath. When I cut into it, fresh milk oozed out. Supposedly, connoisseurs can detect the scent and taste of the special grasses on which the water buffalo feed. Okay. Bufala, as the Italians call it, is not exported from Italy. Supposedly it is best eaten with eight hours or so of production, so it doesn't travel well.
 
My second course was a fettuccine made with a sauce of olive oil, crabmeat and whole tomatoes. The pasta was cooked just right and the sauce was delicious, with just a hint of pepperoncini, the red-hot chilis that Italians in the south love to put in their food. I don’t especially like food spiced that much but this was delicious nonetheless.

On my way back to the hotel, wading through the litter, I passed a bunch of people selling clothing, watches, shoes and everything else. Trashcans around the area were filled to overflowing. On the sidewalk, beside a trash can, sat a Burger King sandwich, half-eaten. I could understand the impulse but why the hell couldn’t the person have put it into the garbage can? I spotted a large flashing sign that said Benvenuto a Napoli. I thought it should be changed to "Welcome to Third World Italy."
 
Satisfied with the culinary part of the tour of Naples, I went back to the hotel, watched some BBC blather about the American elections and then went to bed. The next morning, I caught a train to Florence. The city lies on the Arno river, which bisects the city almost perfectly in half. There are multiple bridges over the river including one, The Ponte Vecchio, the old bridge, that is really quite stunning. Emerging from the train station, I was relieved to see that Florence was clean and orderly. People observed traffic lights and yielded to pedestrians, just like normal humans.
 
I walked around the entire walled part of the city, going in and out through the streets to get to things I wanted to see. I went to the Duomo and then to the Ufficio, really a huge museum dedicated to the greats of Florence's past. I tried to get into the main church here, the church of Santa Maria de Novella but they charge nine Euros per hour and a sign forbade picture taking. So I contented myself with walking around the city.

After about three hours of this my knee was aching so I stopped in a bar and had a coffee and read a little, and wrote notes on the photos I had taken. A local man came in, obviously a few sheets to the wind already, ordered a glass of wine and began lecturing the proprietors about the American elections. Even without much Italian, it was clear this guy didn't admire President Bush. Apparently he spotted me reading a book with an English title, so he came over, sat down, and started lecturing me. I did understand some of what he was saying, about Bush and war and bombing but I didn't want to let on because I figured I never get rid of this clown. He asked me, where you from. America, I said, my heart sinking. So he started in on me about Bush. There was nothing hostile or threatening about him, just annoying. I have a hard enough time communicating with sober Italians, how am I supposed to talk to one who's drunk? Finally, I told the guy, I'm just a tourist; I don't know the president. This started people in the bar laughing. Then he told me, Bush, Kerry, no difference, right? Clinton, now, he was a good guy. Then he made a pumping motion with his arms and "trombone, trombone," this apparently b being an Italian slang for sex. Everyone in the bar was really laughing now and one guy behind the counter made a crack about Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi, who is apparently no slouch in the tromboning department. At that point, I decided to leave them laughing and headed out to find dinner. I had read so much about steak Florentine that I had to try it, even though the cost of the meal broke the 25-Euro rule I had made at the start of my trip that no single meal should cost more than that amount.

Steak Florentine starts out as what we would call a T-bone steak, dressed in olive oil, salt and pepper, and then grilled over a charcoal fire. It is really a large piece of meat, probably a pound or even a little more, far larger than anything I would buy and prepare for myself. It came with flakes of Parmesan cheese sprinkled over it. Traditionally, it is served blood rare but I asked for it ben cotte. Supposedly that means well done, although the Italians idea of well done and mine don’t jibe. The steak actually came medium rare, which is how I would have cooked it for myself, so there was no harm done, although the waiter rolled his eyes at my American stupidity for not wanting it rare. As seemed to be traditional with Italian restaurant meals, the steak came to the table lukewarm. Despite that, it was utterly delicious, so tender that I literally cut it with my fork. The steaks come from a breed of cattle called Chianina, which are raised along a Tuscan river of the same name.

I arrived at Assisi at around 10 am. This town is tourist central, and it was mobbed already. I couldn’t find a place to park closer than a mile away, and it cost me five Euros. Then I had to take a bus to the base of he hill atop of which lies the town.

I had done a tremendous amount of walking on this trip and my knees, particularly my left one, had been aching, so much so that at times I found it difficult to sleep. So, when I got to the base of the hill, I knew I was not going to walk up to the top. As no cars were allowed up there, it was walk, or take a cab. There was no shortage of those, so I flagged one and rode to the top of Assisi.

The city is of course the spiritual and temporal home of the Franciscan order, both sisters and priests. St. Francis of Assisi was one of the more peculiar Roman Catholic saints. He lived around the 12th Century, the privileged son of a wealthy father. At some point in his early 20s, he decided to chuck all that and become a mendicant priest, one who wandered the countryside, preaching and living off handouts. He preached the virtues of poverty, trying to convince other priests and the church hierarchy that the Church was too wealthy and worldly, and should renounce earthly possessions and power.

Needless to say, that was something of a hard sell, and while Francis won the hearts of the poor, his church superiors were less than receptive to his message of hair shirts and short meals. He nevertheless founded an order of priests, brothers and sisters who were sent into the world for centuries following. The popular image of St. Francis, promoted by countless Mass cards and other religious images, is a saintly sort of person who wandered off into the woods and talked to the birds. I recall clearly from childhood an image of St. Francis in a forest glade, holding forth to animals that surrounded him and appeared to be listening with rapt attention. Even to my child’s mind, that sounded odd, since I thought only crazy people talked to animals.

The taxi dropped me off at the top of the hill and I stated exploring. Franciscan sister and priests were everywhere. I stopped into the Basilica of St. Francis hoping to get pictures of the magnificent art above its multiple altars. At the moment, though, a priest was celebrating mass and I feared that taking pictures right then might have gotten me arrested. Further into the town, the Church of St. Francis – yes, everything in the town is named after the saint – was open and empty. On the outside, the church appeared huge,
people. The church’s altar art was nevertheless magnificent, and the three altars looked magnificent. The main altar had an incredible stained glass window behind it, showing religious themes in mosaic. The colors were brilliant.

Assisi is headquarters for the Franciscan order, and there were priests, brothers and sisters everywhere on the streets. The majority wore the traditional Franciscan habit, the brown hooded overrode belted around the middle with a white, knotted cord. In a few cases, I spotted less traditional garb such as the cuffs of blue jeans peaking out from the bottom of the habit and cross trainers on feet.

At the bottom of the hill were lines of tourists buying religious trinkets from sellers’ portable shops. It was kind of jarring, seeing that commercialism exploiting the religious faith of people but it was everywhere in Italy, even at St. Peter’s in Rome.

At the far end of the line of trinket sellers was a snack stand. I wandered over there thinking to get a bottle of water. There was no one behind the counter, so I sat down and looked over the menu, which included hot dogs. I was intrigued. What would an Italian hot dog taste like? When the counter guy came back, I ordered one. It was quite a bit larger than the typical American dog, fatter and longer. The hot dog tasted a lot like bologna, the cold cut named after the city of the same name. I asked the counter man about it. He spoke pretty fluent English and explained that hot dogs in Italy weren’t made from scraps such as pork snouts, lips and cheeks like they are in the States, “that’s why they tasted so much better than American hotdogs.” And they’re better for you, he added.

I couldn‘t dispute that last part, but I didn’t agree that it tasted better. As I said, it tasted a lot like bologna, not a particularly good taste when served hot.

I caught a bus back to my car and drove back to Trevi. I got to bed early. The next day I was set to head to the Adriatic, to a small seacoast city called Pesaro.